8th grade students on the 48h Maker to Entrepreneur Bootcamp

In March 2016, we held the first 48h Maker to Entrepreneur Boot Camp, and we are very happy to share this article by Jenny and Tom, two 8th grade participants from the Canadian International School. The article was published in the April issue of their School’s monthly magazine in both English and Vietnamese.

“On Friday 11th of March, I was fortunate to join five other CIS students to participate in the “48h Maker to Entrepreneur Boot Camp” at FabLab Saigon, which is a small scale workshop offering digital fabrication. Rajesh Nair, a professor from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) led this event with some local “Fab Masters”. One of our first activities was having to come up with simple daily problems (like forgetting to close the fridge) and crazy ways to solve them. I thought that my creativity and imagination has been fading for the past few years, but luckily I was wrong! Additionally, we also learned a bit of coding on an Arduino board. It was very interesting but exhausting because the instructors said we had to do everything by ourselves. On the second day, we were introduced to our big project which was to make a toy with mechanics from scratch. We were divided into groups of four, with students from schools around Ho Chi Minh City. It was awkward at first but as the day progressed we came up with some really awesome ideas. My group came up with the idea of making a cat that follows you around and beeps unless you stop and pet it. We used a 3D printer to print out the cat which we named Memé, a laser cutter to cut out the box used to store the mechanics, two motors for the wheels to run and an ultrasonic sensor so it can sense the distance of something standing in front of it. The toughest challenge was programming our toy so it can do what we want it to do. None of us had any coding experience, but thanks to the Internet and “Fab Masters”, we were successful! Jenny Nguyen (Class 8C Student, CIS)

“The bootcamp in FabLab Saigon was an amazing experience. I had attended this program twice before, but this time it was a lot more fun because I didn’t need to spend time familiarizing myself with the place and its tools. This time I got to really focus on the fun stuff. With us there were other students from a variety of schools around Ho Chi Minh City. There was also Mr. Rajesh Nair from MIT, who taught us a lot of cool things like pitching our ideas, 3D printing, and basic coding. By working as a team, we learned how to research, connect circuits, and most importantly, use teamwork to our advantage and make friends. We overcame difficulties like making a mess of electrical wires, and mixing up the libraries of code by trial and error. A lot of time was spent researching on the internet, and asking the FabLab staff for assistance. Overall, it was a really amazing experience and we learned a lot of cool and useful skills.” Tom Nguyen (Class 8C Student, CIS)